Review: ‘Boom Town,’ by Sam Anderson

They first struck oil in Oklahoma City, Sam Anderson tells us, on Dec. 4, 1928, on the Feast Day of Saint Barbara, Patron Saint of Explosions.

In Anderson’s delightfully deep dive into “one of the great weirdo cities of the world,” Oklahoma City is the very definition of a boom town. With all the busts that invariably follow booms, the city has always functioned “like a laboratory for unavoidable American problems,” he writes, in one of the more unexpectedly entertaining — and stimulating — nonfiction romps in recent memory.

Until now, you most likely haven’t considered setting aside time to read thousands of words on, say, Oklahoma City’s incorrigible, polarizing point guard Russell Westbrook, or the psychedelic goofball Wayne Coyne, leader of the city’s most visible band, the Flaming Lips, or local meteorologist Gary England, “the Weather God of Oklahoma City,” to name three of Anderson’s starring characters. Fellow Americans, I’m here to tell you that it will be time well spent.

The place itself is the writer’s true character, more eccentric than any of its makers. Unlike other cities, which grow organically, the future capital of Oklahoma came into being all at once: on an April day in 1889, almost 40 years earlier, with the preposterous, game-show-like free-for-all known as the Land Run.

Sam Anderson Photo: Jeff Bark

Anderson, a staff writer for the New York Times Magazine, went to Oklahoma City on an assignment a few years back, and then found himself drawn back, again and again. In the great spirit of American capitalism, he learned, Oklahoma City is a Boom Town, capital B, capital T. It essentially erupted into existence. It was built on oil and outsize ambition. In the 1970s, whipped up by the nationwide frenzy for “urban renewal,” it demolished much of its historic downtown, then forgot to carry out the plans for improvement.

Beyond the metaphors, actual booming is a near-constant fact of life in Oklahoma City, as Anderson shows. In the 1960s, with the city desperate for development, the chamber of commerce volunteered the place to the Federal Aviation Administration as the testing ground for the coming renaissance in people-moving: supersonic air travel. For six months, city residents would be subjected to the sonic booms of jets traveling faster than the speed of sound. The test, aborted after three excruciating weeks, was called Operation Bongo.

Years later, the good citizens of Oklahoma City sought another kind of legitimacy in the potential glories of professional sports. After agreeing to host the NBA’s New Orleans Hornets in a temporary arrangement following Hurricane Katrina, the Sooners (everything in this book, and in OKC, ties back to something; the residents’ self-administered nickname comes from the pioneers who jumped the gun in the Land Run) really, really wanted a pro franchise of their own. So a couple of local businessmen offered to buy a struggling NBA team, the Seattle Supersonics. They had no intention, they swore, of moving the team.

Until they did. In 2008, just two years after the sale went through, the Supersonics moved to Oklahoma. There they were renamed the Thunder, after the region’s loud, often cataclysmic weather system.

Throughout the book, as Anderson deftly weaves together history, personalities and his own observations, he tracks the Thunder’s 2012-13 season, when Westbrook and fellow superstar Kevin Durant mounted a championship drive after the sudden departure of future league MVP James Harden. Simile is one of Anderson’s obvious gifts, and it’s on full display in these sections: Westbrook, who relishes making people uncomfortable, has a personality “like a grinding stone,” he writes. Watching the elegant Durant play is “like watching the Eiffel Tower breakdance.”

As most basketball fans know, the Thunder’s expected boom turned out a dud. Anderson saves until the final section of his book the boom that has, in much more ignominious fashion, defined the city to the rest of the world: the 1995 act of domestic terrorism known as the Oklahoma City bombing. Anderson points out that the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building — Timothy McVeigh’s target, where 168 were killed — was, eerily enough, opened amid explosions and the threat of them. On the building’s dedication day, in October 1977, the ceremony was delayed by a bomb threat. Two days later, 30,000 people crowded downtown to witness the implosion of the historic Biltmore Hotel, one of the last acts of the city’s ill-fated urban renewal project.

“Boom Town” hurtles toward its conclusion during the terrible series of tornadoes in May 2013, which bounced the meteorologist England from his life’s work much as the Thunder had just been drummed out of the playoffs they were expected to dominate. Days after the end of the season that was supposed to put Oklahoma City, once and for all, on the map, the biggest storm in its recorded history threatened to wipe it off.

“Sometimes you’ve got to ride out the storm to get to the sunshine,” as a dejected Durant said after his team’s last game. In the end, however we might like to move forward as a group, this book seems to say — whatever planning and scheming and hoping we may do — it’s pretty much always up to the fates.

Boom Town

The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-Class Metropolis

By Sam Anderson

(Crown; 432 pages; $28)

James Sullivan

James Sullivan
Former Chronicle critic James Sullivan is a regular contributor to the Boston Globe and the author of four books. Email: books@sfchronicle.com